This book investigates how women's power and caste cleavages often continue to transcend and crosscut the boundaries of caste/tribe, gender, age, class and religion in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Building upon recent formulations of South Asian gender discourse, it explores the ways that perceived notions of women and castified geographies are not only structured in complex and localized relationships of dominance, but are also constituted by practices of the state and central governments. By examining both the particularities of local women's efforts to improve themselves and the ways that power is mediated, the author addresses the multiplex ways individuals both adapt and contest the hegemony of the dominant structures.

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Pashington Obeng is Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Wellesley College, USA. In 2011-2012 he was Madeleine Haas Russell Visiting Professor at Brandeis University and has also taught at Brown and Harvard Universities, USA. He is the author of Shaping Membership, Defining Nation: The Cultural Politics of African Indians in South Asia (2007).